Peter McLaren

Peter McLaren is a Canadian-American scholar and is known as one of the leading architects of critical pedagogy. He is known for his writings on critical literacy, sociology of education, cultural studies, critical ethnography, and Marxist theory.
McLaren is a practicing Catholic and identifies with Catholic social justice teaching and liberation theology. He is a strident critic of Christian nationalism and Catholic Integralism. McLaren helped regenerate Marxist education scholarship and has influenced a new generation of global intellectuals, including Curry Malott, Noah de Lissovoy, Tyson E. Lewis, Derek R. Ford, among many others.

Life and career

Peter McLaren was born in Toronto, Ontario, on 2 August 1948, and spent a brief time living in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He began writing creatively in grade school.
He earned a Bachelor of Arts in English literature at University of Waterloo in 1973, attended Toronto Teachers College, and then earned a Bachelor of Education at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Education, a Masters of Education at Brock University's College of Education, and a Ph.D. at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
McLaren taught elementary and middle school from 1974-1979.
After earning his doctorate in 1983, he served as a Special Lecturer in Education at Brock University, where, as a one-year sabbatical replacement, he specialized in inner-city education and language arts. When McLaren's contract was not extended, he decided to pursue an academic appointment in the United States.
McLaren taught at Miami University's School of Education and Allied Professions from 1985-1993, where he worked with Henry Giroux during a time when critical pedagogy was gaining traction in North American schools of education. McLaren also served as Director of the Center for Education and Cultural Studies and held the title of Renowned Scholar-in-Residence at Miami University before being recruited by the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, in 1993.
In 2013, McLaren was appointed Distinguished Fellow in Critical Studies at Chapman University, Orange, California, where he worked until his retirement in 2023. He was co-director of the Paulo Freire Democratic Project and International Ambassador for Global Ethics and Social Justice. He is the honorary Director of the Center for Critical Studies in Education at Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China.
In 2019, McLaren published an autobiographical graphic novel with artist Miles Wilson.
McLaren converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism when he was 35 and completing his dissertation. Subsequently, McLaren became interested in Catholic social justice teaching and liberation theology. Since then McLaren’s work has been expressly Catholic and is critical of Christians who do not believe in the eschaton.
McLaren believes that "all acts of violence generate forms of evil" and through evil and violence there can not be the Kingdom of God.

Academic Research

1980–1993

After graduating, McLaren focused on educational theory, specifically exploring ethnography, pedagogy, curriculum, and multiculturalism. He was inspired by his undergraduate work with Elizabethan drama and William Morris, an English artist and socialist. Victor Turner, a symbolic anthropologist, was contemporaneously conducting research on rituals and how they related to dramaturgical theory and anthropology, and McLaren took inspiration from Turner. His first major publication, Schooling as a Ritual Performance Towards a Political Economy of Educational Symbols and Gestures in 1986, was based on his Ph.D. dissertation.
McLaren's work from 1984 to 1994 closely stuck with the teachings of the Frankfurt School of social theory and critical philosophy. Each of McLaren's scholarly projects attempted to explore the construction of identity in school contexts within a neoliberal society.

1994–present

McLaren shifted focus after 1994 to critique the political economy, focusing on the social relations of production and its relation to the production of subjectivity and protagonist agency. During this time, he spent time in Latin America working with Chavistas in Venezuela and with labor and union leaders in Mexico and Colombia.
Peter McLaren began engaging with Marxist theory after meeting anti-imperialist activists in Latin America and began including aspects of it into his work.
McLaren has contributed to independent news outlets such as the LA Progressive.
Professor McLaren has participated in global social and political dialogues, including the peace process between the Turkish government and the PKK.

Honorary doctorates

Peter McLaren was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Lapland, Finland, in 2004, by Universidad del Salvador, Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2010, by the Universidad Nacional de Chilecito in La Rioja, Argentina, and the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos de Educación Inclusiva, Chile, in 2021. He also received the Amigo Honorifica de la Comunidad Universitaria de esta Institucion by La Universidad Pedagogica Nacional, Unidad 141, Guadalajara, Mexico.

La Fundacion McLaren de Pedagogía Critica

In 2005, McLaren cofounded La Fundacion McLaren de Pedagogía Critica with Sergio Quiroz Miranda, to promote critical pedagogy in Latin America. On September 15, 2006 the Catedra Peter McLaren was inaugurated at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela

Political beliefs

McLaren has been a fierce critic of Trumpism, stating that "Trump has put democracy on the slaughter bench of history."
In January 2006, McLaren was named as one of the faculty in the Bruin Alumni Association's controversial "Dirty Thirty" project, which listed UCLA's most politically extreme professors. The list was compiled by a former UCLA graduate student, Andrew Jones, who had previously been fired by his mentor David Horowitz for pressuring "students to file false reports about leftists" and for stealing Horowitz's mailing list of potential contributors to fund research for attacks on left-wing professors.
Following Russia's military intervention in Ukraine, McLaren began publishing books and articles surrounding the war. He serves on the editorial board of the Ukrainian journal Philosophy of Education.